


Avalanche Country

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Avalanches, Families of Choice, Feels, Friendship, Gen, Huddling For Warmth, Hypothermia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-13 15:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9130354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Jack and Peggy are caught in an avalanche while on a mission.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sheron](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron/gifts).



It was one of the rare times when Jack managed to get the jump on her. Peggy had been lost in contemplation of the journal, holding one of her gloves in her mouth while she turned pages with cold-stiffened fingers, trying to interpret Ivchenko's line drawings. Slowly the rumbling penetrated her consciousness -- it was shaking the ground under her feet ... 

She started to look up, awareness of what was happening dawning on her just as a pair of hands caught her and she was flung -- driven -- into the snow and scree beneath the outcrop of rocks where they'd stopped halfway up the mountainside to rest.

And then the world was filled with a haze of powder so thick she couldn't breathe. Peggy flattened herself beneath the rocks as dust-fine snow filled her mouth and eyes and the world turned dark. Everything shook as if someone had set off a bomb under her feet.

Finally it slackened, died. She coughed out a mouthful of ice crystals and raised her head. She was half buried in snow, and everything was dim but not entirely dark. It was just light enough to see, in the light filtering through the wall of snow blocking her under the rocks.

Jack was nowhere in sight.

Her radio let out a burst of static from somewhere under the snow.

Peggy sat up, shaking it off her. She had dropped everything -- her diary, her glove, the radio. Her pack and Jack's were still dimly visible in the twilight of the snow cave, propped under the rocks where they'd taken them off.

She tucked the icy fingers of her right hand against her neck to warm them, and groped through the snow with her still-gloved left hand until she managed to find the radio by following the sounds of Daniel's crackling voice, half obliterated in static.

"-- _answer me,_ Peggy. It looked like half the mountain came down -- _please_ tell me you weren't under there."

She had to wait for a break when he let off the button to talk. "Daniel, it's Peggy. I'm fine."

"Oh, thank _God._ You scared the hell out of me. What it looked like from down here ..." He took a breath. "Where are you?"

Peggy looked up at the wall of blue-white snow facing her, glowing gently with the daylight on the other side. "Buried in snow."

There was a brief silence from the other end of the radio, and then: "You _said_ you were all right! Peggy, that doesn't sound like all right to me."

"I'm perfectly unhurt." Thanks in large part to Jack, who had been snatched away in the tide of snow -- she resolutely did not allow herself to think of what had happened to him. "Daniel, see if you can raise Jack on the radio. We were ... separated. I am going to try to dig myself out."

She tucked the radio into a pocket of her coat and scrambled to her feet. Her legs were shaking, she realized distantly. Trying to pay that no mind, she stumbled through the knee-deep snow that had drifted under the rocky outcropping to their packs, which were snow-encrusted but unharmed. She had a spare pair of gloves in hers, and she got those out first. Then she unbound the ice axe strapped to the back of her pack, and the snow shovel on Jack's.

The snow that had sealed her off from the world was tightly packed, and yielded most easily to the ice axe. She switched back and forth between the tools, hacking her way out in a careless shower of snow chunks that occasionally threatened to bury her, and tried very hard not to think about the avalanche snatching Jack away, or Daniel's entreaties over the radio in her pocket, alternating between annoyed and increasingly desperate.

"You'd better have lost your radio, Thompson -- that's the only excuse we're going to accept --"

Peggy broke free into clear air and sharp winter sunshine with a gasp of relief. All around her, the mountainside that had been an unbroken and serene blanket of white when they'd first started to climb was now a scene of devastation. Uprooted trees and dislodged boulders were strewn in a wasteland of dirty snow.

"Jack," she murmured, looking around her. Was it even possible to survive something like that? She forced herself not to dwell on the morbid possibilities, and called his name. Her voice echoed across the snowfield, triggering a few cascades of powder from some of the more unstable areas.

"I'm coming up there," Daniel declared on the radio.

Peggy snatched it out of her pocket. "You will do no such thing. Stay where you are. The base camp is all right, I trust?"

"It's fine. The snow didn't come down anywhere near this far." Given his physical limitations, Daniel had stayed at their base camp near the airstrip below, while Jack and Peggy climbed the mountainside in an attempt to locate the hidden HYDRA base mentioned in Ivchenko's notes. "But listen, Peggy, if you're going to have to search, you'll need more than one person to do it."

"It would help, I admit, but --" She looked up at the snowfield above her, where small plumes of snow rose occasionally as more chunks of ice and snow broke free. "Daniel, this whole area is unstable. Another avalanche could come down at any moment."

"You're not inspiring me to stay down here." She could hear rustling in the background. Oh God, he really _was_ heading up.

"No, what I need is to have backup somewhere _safe."_ She had to force herself to harden her voice into a whipcrack of authority. She'd rarely shouted at Daniel, and under these circumstances it tore something inside her. But she _needed_ him safe, for reasons both practical and ... not. "Daniel, I need _you_ to get in touch with SHIELD right now and see about having medical help sent out. And I need you down there to serve as a point of contact in the unlikely event that something does happen to me."

She heard him blow his breath out, but he didn't try to fight her on it. Daniel was practical. She knew that practical considerations were the way to win him.

"Tell you what, then. I'm going to call home, see if I can raise a medical flight, and then I'm coming partway up the mountain -- not into the danger zone, all right? But at least close enough to -- I don't know -- Peggy, I can't _sit_ here. And I can bring supplies."

"All right," she conceded. It was a reasonable compromise. Also, realistically speaking, by the time Daniel did manage to get up to the slide zone, it was likely that things would have resolved themselves one way or another; she and Jack had been climbing all morning.

While she was arguing with Daniel over the radio, she had climbed out of the hole she'd cut for herself and was scrambling over the rough surface left behind by the avalanche. She and Jack had been together, and the wave of snow had gone straight down the mountain, which meant he ought to be below her.

... possibly a half mile below her, and possibly buried under tons of snow, but she didn't dare think that far ahead. There was no point in assuming that he could not be rescued if she was going to put herself at risk in the attempt.

"Jack," she said into the radio as she stumbled and slid over the broken surface of the snow, using the shovel as an alpenstock. "Jack Thompson, you know I don't like to pull rank, but as your boss at SHIELD, I demand a status report this very minute."

No response this time, either. She swallowed the lump in her throat and fiercely told herself that it meant nothing. Perhaps he'd lost the radio; perhaps he was unconscious. In any case, she needed to think of a way to find someone who was buried under the snow, because he certainly wasn't on top of it.

 

***

 

Jack could actually hear them; he just couldn't respond. He guessed the radio was about ten or fifteen feet from him, close enough that he could hear Peggy and Daniel's voices well enough to make out most of the words.

Still, being able to hear them was oddly comforting. It would have been even more comforting to have the radio in his hands, of course ...

He'd instinctively wrapped his arms around his head, and so, once his helpless tumbling had stopped, he had ended up with a little air space around his face to breathe in. He was still tightly enclosed by snow on all sides. It felt like being tightly wrapped in a very cold blanket.

Or buried alive.

But that was a train of thought that was very likely to lead to panic attacks. He'd already had one, it hadn't been fun in the slightest and it had probably used up precious oxygen, and now he was trying very hard not to let his thoughts drift in directions likely to cause another.

The important thing was figuring out a way to get out of here.

It didn't help that he couldn't move and was massively uncomfortable. His arms were still doubled up around his head, and one of them was definitely messed up somehow -- maybe broken, maybe dislocated at the shoulder, as he'd discovered when he started trying to squirm. He also was bruised all over; he'd been tumbled and battered like a piece of windblown debris in a hurricane. When he'd first come to a rest, he had been unable to figure out which orientation he'd landed in, but was increasingly getting the feeling, from the growing sense of pressure inside his skull, that he was lying with his head tilted downward.

The awkward position made breathing difficult and made it hard to tell if he was actually running short of oxygen already, or if he was simply having trouble getting enough air because he was lying head-down with snow pressing on him from all sides. His head hurt, but he wasn't sure if that was a symptom of low oxygen and/or carbon dioxide buildup, or if it was more to do with the blood rushing to his head, combined with having gotten whacked around so much in the avalanche that there probably wasn't a part of his body left unbruised.

He'd bitten his lip at some point -- he thought that might have been during the initial panic attack rather than the avalanche, but if anyone asked, it was _definitely_ the avalanche that had done it. Anyway, his mouth tasted like blood, which wasn't improving his disposition.

If he could only get to that damned radio ...

He'd tried yelling, but it didn't seem to have any effect. Either Peggy wasn't near enough to hear him, or his voice couldn't penetrate however many feet of snow were on top of him. It was nearly dark, though once his eyes had adjusted, there was a dim, omnidirectional gray light that didn't help in the slightest with determining which way the surface was.

He could easily be buried under thirty or forty feet of snow -- but no. No. No more panic-inducing thoughts; only sensible, useful, getting-out-of-this-damned-snow thoughts were permitted in _this_ particular snow cave.

On top of everything else, he'd lost a glove in the tumble, on the opposite hand to the arm that had something wrong with it, and those fingers were tingling and stinging and rapidly going numb. He'd tried wriggling them to keep them warm, but this just got them covered in fresh snow which melted and hurt him with a cold that ached all the way down to his bones.

He wasn't sure what was going to do him in first: suffocation or freezing.

_Okay, those are not winner thoughts. Those are loser thoughts. Nobody wins by having loser thoughts._

The radio crackled, wherever it was, and he jerked to attention. "So, there's good news and bad news," Daniel's voice said, blurred with static.

"Thank you for that, Ops Chief Sousa, master of understatement," Jack muttered. He missed Peggy's response -- _zoning out, not good_ \-- and tuned back in to hear Daniel's reply.

"The good news is," Daniel said, "I did manage to raise our Swiss field office, tricky as _that's_ been with all these mountains in the way. The bad news is, there's a weather front sweeping in, with high winds and snow, and it's going to hit us in the next hour. They want to know if it's enough of a medical emergency to be worth scrambling a flight anyway."

There was a silence on Peggy's end. Making those kinds of decisions never got easier, Jack knew; there were no shortcuts to find answers to the brutal calculus that went into weighing one life against another.

In a way, he'd had it easy. He hadn't had time to think when he'd grasped in one blinding instant what was about to happen to them, and had thrown Peggy under the overhang rather than diving for shelter himself. If he'd had time to stop and weigh those two options -- Peggy's life, versus suffocating in a snowy grave himself -- he wasn't sure how he would have chosen.

He was glad the choice had been taken out of his hands. It was always easier to make a decision when there wasn't really a decision to be made.

 _But come on, Peggy,_ he thought, to her continued silence. _This isn't a hard one. I don't actually need a medical team, you know. If you don't find me in time ... well ... not gonna matter, and if you do, I'm not in bad enough shape that it's worth a whole rescue flight wiping out on a mountainside in a blizzard trying to get to me._

At least he didn't think so. It would help if he had the radio so he could _tell her that._

Peggy was saying something about not scrambling a flight yet, but having them stand by in case the weather broke. Jack barely heard her; he was thinking about the radio again.

It might be closer than ten or fifteen feet. Maybe more like five, or even two or three. If he could only reach it ...

"Keep talking, you two," he muttered as he began to squirm, pawing awkwardly at the snow as he pushed it aside to allow himself to move. It was only partially effective because there was nowhere to _put_ the snow; to clear a space to move in, he had to do one of two things, either fill his breathing area with loose snow, or push hard enough to compress it so he could wriggle forward.

And now they were being quiet. "Come on," Jack said aloud. "Talk!" Then, since he was using up oxygen anyway, he tried yelling, "Peggy!" at the top of his lungs. Predictably, there was no answer.

The mountainside was vast. God only knew how far he'd been carried, and where Peggy was looking for him compared to where he actually was.

He let his forehead drop to rest on his forearm. Every movement hurt, especially in his injured arm, an agonizing electric zing that he felt all the way from his arm (which was a solid bar of pain) up to his jaw and ear. He was pretty sure that _something_ was broken in that arm. Trying to dig with it might be messing it up for good.

_And if I get out of here, I don't even care. I'll get a little arm-crutch to match Daniel's leg crutch._

_... that doesn't even make sense._

He was getting punchy. Cold? Lack of air? Who the fuck cared; it wasn't like it was going to matter _what_ he'd died of when they dug up his frozen corpse ...

"Peggy," Daniel said, and Jack jumped. Which hurt like _fuck,_ but Daniel's voice had been very close, almost in his ear. He was right. The radio wasn't that far away.

"I'm leaving the base camp now," Daniel went on, while Jack scrabbled at the snow with hands that felt like blocks of wood and a left arm that was on fire from shoulder to wrist. "I'll bring supplies. What do you expect to need?"

"When I find Jack," Peggy said (gotta love that _when,_ Jack mused as he dug), "he'll likely be hypothermic, perhaps injured. I'm soaked as well. We are going to need supplies for warming us both up. Dry clothes, blankets, the camp stove if you can carry it, tea supplies ... oh, and some kind of shelter, perhaps the emergency tent if it's not too much."

"I'm putting a pack together now," Daniel said, and there was more, but Jack didn't care because _he had it,_ the radio, he was pawing it out of the snow with unresponsive hands. He tucked it under his chin while he flexed the fingers of his gloveless right hand, or tried to, and then stuck that inside his collar as well, trying to get some feeling back into his numb fingers.

Of course now that he had the radio, they wouldn't _shut up._ He couldn't say anything until one of them would let up their mic button for more than a second in between bursts of jabber. Peggy kept thinking of more things she just couldn't do without, loading poor Daniel down like a pack mule ( _how uncharacteristically feminine of her,_ Jack thought dryly, though most women's shopping lists did not include things like dry rations and Sterno).

Finally, _finally_ they shut up for a minute and Jack jabbed the button down. "Well, _hell,_ if you two would stay off the radio and give someone else a chance to talk, maybe I could get a word in."

 

***

 

Peggy almost dropped the radio, too startled to key the mic. Daniel beat her to it. "Thompson, you ass." He was laughing breathlessly.

"Is that any way to greet a long-lost friend?" Jack's voice was slow, dragging, and Peggy could hear his teeth chattering. That snapped her out of her euphoria. Whether he was just now getting in touch because it had taken him this long to get the radio working, or because he'd been unconscious, either way he was buried somewhere in the snow, and still in deep trouble.

"Friend? Let's not get carried away here."

"Up yours, Sousa."

"Jack," Peggy said when she was able to insert herself into the conversation, "is there anything urgent we need to know about your situation? Anything you can tell us about where you are?"

"Where I am is buried under a fu -- under a lot of snow," Jack said, and she could hear a sudden surge of desperation under the surface flippancy. "How I am is cold. Where I'd like to be is on a beach in the Caribbean sipping mai tais. Any luck getting me there?" There was a painful edge to his voice on the last sentence.

"We're working on it," she said, and stopped walking, standing still in the middle of the field of snow and debris. Above her, clouds were burgeoning over the mountains -- the storm Daniel had mentioned -- and the wind had begun to pick up. _Because all we need now is a storm giving us yet another deadline._ She knew from the war how quickly these mountains could go to white-out conditions.

"Peggy, Jack, I'm leaving the base camp now, heading up your way," Daniel said.

His voice was staticky from the distance between here and the camp, something she hadn't really thought about until hearing Jack speak over the radio; his voice was much clearer and louder. Actually ... could she use that?

"Jack?" she said. "I'm going to try something. I think I might be able to tell how close I am to you based on how strong your radio signal is. Does that make sense?"

"Sure," Jack said. "What _doesn't_ make sense at this point?" And he laughed.

That didn't sound good. Their ticking rescue countdown might be a lot tighter than she'd thought. "Jack, I need you to start talking while I walk. All right? Daniel, please maintain radio silence for now, unless you have something urgent to say."

There was an unexpectedly long pause. Finally Jack slurred, "Talk about what?"

"Anything. I don't care. I need you to talk, that's all, so I can find you. Since I won't be able to get on the radio while you're tying up the channel, please stop every so often in case Daniel or I need to say something."

Nothing but silence. "Jack!" she said, resisting the urge to shake her radio. "I need you to talk to me, or this won't work!"

"No pressure, huh?" Jack complained. "Look, want me to give a speech to the Rotary Club, bullshit on for an hour about all the great work we're doing -- I mean -- bull ... crap. Pardon my French, Peggy ..."

"As if I've never heard you swear before," she muttered, scrambling over the ice and dislodged rocks with the radio in one hand and the snow shovel in the other. He'd gone quiet again, but he still had the mic button down -- which meant she couldn't talk to him, but it also meant that she could hear the very faint hiss and pop of static in the background.

It was a stupid way of closing in on his location, but she couldn't think of anything else.

"Come on, Jack," she murmured. One of her feet slipped as a gust of wind hit her, and she caught herself by slamming the shovel into the avalanche-compacted snow. "Don't pass out on us."

"Where was I? Rotary. Right. Actually, it's your turn." He released the mic button and her radio went suddenly dead.

"No, still your turn," Peggy told him. The light around her went abruptly flat, and she looked up to see that the clouds had swallowed the sun. The mountain peaks across the valley were already obscured by swirling snow, and far below her, she glimpsed Daniel's small figure toiling up the slope, struggling through snow that posed much more of a challenge to him than it did to her or Jack.

"If you can't think of anything else," she told the radio, "then talk about your childhood, or tell us interesting tales of things that happened to you when you were still working for the New York SSR. _Anything,_ Jack. I need the words. The content of them doesn't matter."

"Typical," Jack complained after a minute, rallying somewhat. "When have you ever listened to anything I said? Of course, now that you're my boss, I guess you don't have to ... Anyway, everything interesting that ever happened to me in New York was mainly because of you two."

The wind hit her harder, clawing at her and trying to rip her from the mountainside. Willing the storm to hold off, she stumbled downhill, trying not to trip and send herself sprawling. She was fairly sure she was going in the right direction; the static was even less than it had been earlier, the signal stronger.

"-- wasn't the same after you left, you know? And okay, I get that sending you to L.A. was my idea in the first place; you'd have been happy to stay." He laughed softly. "Even if it did work out for you and Sousa in the end. You never thanked me for that. No gratitude."

"As _if,_ you wanker," Peggy muttered, sliding on a patch of loose snow. 

"Nice of you to invite me along to SHIELD, though, you know? Even if it is _Director_ Carter now. Ah hell, Peggy, you and I both know you earned the Chief's desk at the old SSR, not me. Saying 'yes ma'am' and 'no ma'am' is really the least I could do --"

"Never having said either one to me, I don't know what makes you say so," she remarked as she slipped and slid between two toppled boulders, each as large as a car, and then paused. Was it her imagination, or was she getting more interference on the radio now? Had she passed him? Heart beating fast, she turned and scrambled back up the mountainside, as the first grainy specks of snow swirled down around her.

She hoped that, between the hypoxia and the hypothermia, Jack still retained enough mental acuity not to share anything _terribly_ personal. Not that she thought Daniel was likely to take anything amiss, under the circumstances, but if Jack's rambling strayed to Okinawa or something of that nature, it could make for some incredibly awkward conversations later on.

"Given that this probably is our last conversation," Jack went on, and something unexpected and sharp knifed through Peggy's chest, snatching her breath away, "I guess I should be taking this opportunity to -- oh hell, I don't know. Anything I could say, probably doesn't need to be said. I guess we all made up our minds about each other a long time ago."

"Have some faith in me, you bloody annoying man," Peggy said aloud. "And get off the radio, would you? Yes, I know this was my idea, but I _did_ say you should shut up every once in a while, and it would be very helpful if you would make some noise now. I think I'm actually close to you; now you need to give me some help."

Jack, of course, was still talking. "Peggy, Peggy ... if I can make one request, try to say something nice about me at my funeral. Lie if you have to. Oh, and don't hold my family against me, if that's possible. Not that I can blame you. _I_ hold them against me too. But some of them are all right. I hope my cousin Cecilia shows up. CeCe is okay. I should have introduced you to her, come to think of it. I think you would have gotten along. I don't even know what she's up to these days; I haven't seen her since the family disinherited her when she married an artist and ran off to Brazil ... what was that guy's name ..."

"Naargh!" Why was it that the men she worked with could always reduce her to incoherent noises of frustration? She couldn't even get in touch with Daniel to see if he had any ideas for narrowing down Jack's location further than she'd already managed to do because _Jack wouldn't get off the bloody radio._

"What was I talking about? Oh ... Sousa ... Daniel," Jack rambled on. "Didn't mean to ignore you. I should have been better to you. Never really got around to apologizing for all of that. I mean, it's all water under the bridge now, though, right? Are you even listening? You're probably my best friend, you know. Unless Peggy is. Or both of you ... I guess ... possibly by virtue mostly of not really having any other friends. Close ones, I mean. But still, you two ... I was lucky, you know. To meet you. To know you. I'm glad you're here -- not _here_ here, obviously, but knowing you're listening, it does help, a little ... not being alone at the end ..."

This was intolerable. "Jack!" she screamed at the top of her lungs. "Jack Thompson, get off the radio _now!"_

There was a sudden, blessed silence on the radio, though the line was still open, which meant she still couldn't talk to him. Then Jack said faintly, "Peggy?"

"You heard that," she marveled. "You heard me. Jack!" She raised her voice again, shouting with all the volume she could muster. "Turn the bloody radio _off,_ and shout so I can _find_ you!"

Whether or not he'd done it on purpose, the static of the connection cut out, and Peggy keyed the mic. "Jack, I think I'm close to you. Shout, man, if you want to be rescued. Let me know where you are." _And stop giving us your last requests before I punch you._

She tilted her head and listened. The rising wind was an irritating distraction, snatching sound away, leading her on with false ghosts of nonexistent voices. But through it all, when she concentrated, she thought she could catch snatches of Jack's voice shouting her name: the faintest thread of sound.

She slid and scrambled over the snow. "Jack!"

"Peggy?" And this time she _did_ hear him, she was sure of it.

She set to digging frantically, hacking her way through the icy, packed snow, and pulling out large chunks of snow and rocks with her hands when the shovel was inadequate. She uncovered first the shoulder of his coat, then a tuft of blond hair -- and she had him.

"Daniel, Daniel, I've got him, I've found him, he's out." She dropped the radio, abandoning it to Daniel's relieved swearing, so she could use both hands to pull Jack out of the snow. "Jack. _Jack._ " He was completely covered in snow; he'd lost his hat somehow, and it was plastered in his hair, frosted on his eyebrows and lashes and the light stubble of blond beard that he'd acquired over the last day or so. 

She'd only hugged him once before, at her wedding, and he was the one who'd initiated it that time, a half-drunken hug that was one of many hugs she'd received that day. This time she threw her arms around him and hugged him snow and all, burying her face in his hair. She could feel him shaking. As she started to pull away, he gave a sharp gasp, sucking in air through his teeth.

"What's wrong? Are you hurt?"

"I ... don't know. Yes?" His words were barely comprehensible through his chattering teeth.

"Where?" she asked, pulling back. Under the heavy winter coat, she couldn't tell if anything was visibly wrong, although his face was bruised and there was a smear of dried blood across his cheek. As she gave him a quick visual check, something caught her attention. He'd lost a glove.

"Oh, your hand. My God, Jack."

"Oh," he said vaguely. He stared down at his red, swollen fingers as Peggy wrapped her hand around his. It felt like a block of ice. She stripped off her own glove and pulled it over his bare hand while he watched her with a blank lack of comprehension.

Snow was falling heavily around them, drawing a veil across the world. She had to get Jack warm, but she needed to get them somewhere safe too -- and this unstable snowfield did not qualify, especially with more loose, fresh snow adding to the burden on the upper slopes. Peggy leaned down to find the radio. "Daniel, do you copy?"

"I'm here," he said immediately. "How is he?"

"Cold. Daniel, we're losing visibility up here. Wherever you are, I want you to stop and make camp right now."

"I'm not that close to you --"

"I know, but the higher you get, the worse the avalanche danger will be, and the greater the chance we'll miss each other as the storm gets worse. Jack and I will come down to you. I need you make sure we have somewhere warm when we get there."

"Copy that," he said immediately, and her heart melted a little. Reliable Daniel. "Just get yourself down safely. Look for ..." There was a hesitation. "There's an outcrop of rock that looks like a finger hooked over at the tip. I'm going to make camp at the base of it. That'll give us some protection from slides if any make it down this far. Okay?"

"Understood. We'll be there soon."

She turned to Jack, who was swaying, staring at nothing. She needed to get him to shelter quickly. And, given their limited options, she could only think of one way to do that.

If he was badly hurt, she'd run the risk of hurting him worse -- not to mention killing them both, but she thought the odds were small enough to be worth it. They couldn't wait out a storm on the mountainside, not with Jack in his present condition.

She stripped off her coat and spread it out on the snow. Underneath, she was wearing a fuzzy jumper, but the wind bit through it; she was already shivering as she made Jack sit down on her coat and then sat behind him, reached around him with both arms, and pulled up the tails of the coat around his legs.

"Peggy ..." He seemed to come back to himself, enough to realize that she was embracing him from behind, with her legs wrapped around him. He gave her a baffled look over his shoulder, blinking fresh snow off his lashes. "What are you doing?"

"Saving both of us, I hope," she told him, and kicked them off.

It took some effort to get them moving. A coat, even a very modern one made of StarkTech fabric, was in no way an ideal sled. Once they managed to hit a steep enough part of the slope, however, it was suddenly a very effective sled indeed.

The steering actually worked much better than she'd been afraid it would, considering that her sole source of control for their "sled" was a fistful of wadded-up coat, as long as she could get Jack to lean the right direction at the right moment. (In fairness, he seemed too stunned to do anything else.) The biggest problem was that she couldn't see very well, especially with the wind whipping snow in her face.

They proceeded down the mountain in a series of exhilarating-yet-terrifying bursts of speed punctuated by slowing to a near stop on the flatter sections. Peggy stabbed her boots into the snow and dragged them to a forcible stop just a few dozen yards downhill from Daniel's crooked rock. She was very pleased with herself for recognizing it from his description, especially in the poor visibility conditions. A small tent had been pitched beneath its protection, and Daniel was standing in front of it, staring at them as he was caught, frozen, in the act of filling a bowl with snow to melt for water.

Peggy released her boot heels from the snow one by one, as soon as she was confident they weren't going to start sliding again, and stood up carefully, using a hand on Jack's shoulder to keep her balance. She waved to Daniel, and gave Jack a hand getting to his feet. He swayed and slumped on her. He was no longer shivering, which she knew was a very bad sign. They had to get warm -- both of them. She was going to be in bad shape soon herself if she stayed out here much longer.

Dragging her snow-covered coat behind her while supporting Jack, her teeth chattering as the wind cut through her jumper, she slogged up-slope towards a stunned-looking Daniel.

"Peggy," he said at last, when she was close enough. "Did you just ... slide down the mountain on your coat."

"One does what one must," she remarked through cold-stiff lips.

"Right ... anyway. The emergency tent isn't large, so you should both take off as much of your snow-covered gear outside the tent as you can, so we don't track too much snow in. Hi, Jack," he added, as Peggy dumped Jack on him so she could sit down in the snow and begin struggling with the frozen laces of her boots. 

"Huh?" Jack said, blinking at him.

He was really out of it. And Peggy knew if she didn't get warmed up, she was going to be in that state herself in a minute. Having donated her spare glove to Jack, her gloveless hand was too stiff and clumsy to be much help undoing her laces; she gave up and toed off the boots without untying them. Her jumper was a caked mass of snow; so were her trousers. "Daniel, you brought dry clothes, didn't you?"

"In the tent," Daniel said, looking over from helping Jack get his coat off.

"Brilliant," Peggy said in relief, and told herself that she was only going to have to be cold for a minute, and then she'd be warm again. As fast as possible, she peeled out of her snow-covered jumper, followed by her trousers, leaving her in her underwear in the swirling snow.

Daniel was staring again.

As she undid the tent flap, shivering, Peggy said over her shoulder, "We're married, dear. It's nothing you haven't seen before."

"Well, _he_ hasn't. I hope." In spite of his tone, Daniel was gentle as he helped Jack sit down in the snow just outside the tent flap and started pulling off his boots.

Peggy tumbled into the tent with gooseflesh breaking out all over her body. She found that Daniel had been busy. He already had their sleeping bags spread out; between those and the bulk of his half-empty pack, the small amount of space in the tent already felt cramped. Peggy pulled handfuls of clothing out of the pack, found her spare jumper, and dragged it over her head as waves of shivering wracked her body. Not bothering with trousers, she crawled back to the tent flap just in time to help Daniel manhandle an ice-cold and mostly naked Jack into the tent.

Even in the dim light in the tent, she could see that Jack was bruised all over, his left shoulder hunched up and his arm pressed to his chest and mottled with bruises.

"I think his arm's broken," Daniel said, leaning in after her.

"We'll have to deal with that in a moment." Jack was really out of it; he wasn't talking and compliantly allowed himself to be bundled into what turned out to be two sleeping bags zipped together into one big one.

"I only brought two of the bags," Daniel said. "I figured in this amount of space, we couldn't fit three anyway. There's hot coffee in the Thermos." 

"Daniel, you are a prince." She wasn't an aficionado of coffee, but the important word in that sentence was _hot._

Daniel laughed and let the tent flap fall behind him. Peggy could hear him moving around outside the tent, stowing their gear.

It wasn't any warmer in the tent than it was outside, but Peggy was weak with the sheer relief of being out of the wind, with her snowy things off and the promise of warmth to come. Once she got both herself and Jack zipped into the sleeping bag, she sat up and located the Thermos next to the Sterno stove. One thing about the tiny size of the tent: she could reach everything inside it without having to move much.

The coffee was bitter and unpleasant, but _hot._ After a few blessed swallows, she burrowed down into the sleeping bag and nudged Jack. "Are you awake?"

"Nggghh."

Peggy propped him up and got him to drink small sips from the cup. He was hunched and miserable-looking and felt like ice even to her chilled skin, but he wasn't totally unresponsive and he was able to drink.

The tent flap opened and snow swirled in. "Sorry," Daniel said. "It's really coming down out there." He shed his coat and boots, tucking the coat over the top of the boots to keep the snow out of them, and struggled in -- he couldn't precisely _crawl,_ instead sitting down and scooting into the tent while dragging his legs after him. He had a bowl of snow with him for melting purposes. "Find the coffee?"

"Found it," Peggy said from the mound of sleeping bag into which she and Jack were now bundled. "It's lovely. Thank you."

"I don't think you've ever called my coffee lovely before."

"I've never been this cold before."

Daniel leaned over briefly to kiss her. His lips felt warm against hers, and since he'd just been outside, she assumed that meant she was still alarmingly cold. 

"Are you hurt, Peg?"

"No. I'm fine." The worst thing was the feeling coming back to her gloveless hand, stinging and burning. "Thank you for coming up to meet us. I don't think I could have sledded all the way down to the base camp; the pitch of the slope isn't steep enough."

"You would have tried though, wouldn't you?" He shook his head with a little laugh. "I hope we don't regret being up here instead of down there if this storm lasts more than a few hours. This tent is pretty cramped. And speaking of which, I don't think there's room for all three of us and _this_ thing, too."

He unbuckled his trousers and squirmed a little as he undid the waistband of the leg's harness. Getting it out of the trouser leg in the confines of the tent was harder; he nearly whacked Peggy in the head with it.

"Do be careful with that thing."

"Sorry. Much easier to move around in here like this, though." He tucked it behind the pack. "I'll get the stove fired up and you can have tea. How's _he_ doing?"

"Better than before," she said. Jack was resting against her, under the comforting weight of the sleeping bag; she wasn't sure if he was conscious or not, but she could feel the even rise and fall of his breathing. "You know, on the mountain, Daniel ... he saved me. I was looking at Ivchenko's map. I didn't even realize there _was_ an avalanche. He could have saved himself or me. He saved me."

Daniel was silent for a moment, then said, "You always did have good instincts about people, Peggy."

"Sometimes," she said, thinking of the people she'd been wrong about. Ivchenko, for example.

"More like usually." The stove was burning steadily now, melting snow for water. Trying not to knock anything over, Daniel struggled his way into the sleeping bag on Peggy's other side. "Body heat," he explained. "I'm the only one of us who's actually warm. Besides, I don't know if you've noticed, but this tent is freezing."

"It felt warm enough to me," Peggy said.

Daniel wrapped an arm around her. "That's because you're cold as ice, dear."

"Only because someone is letting cold air in," she complained. Daniel felt like a furnace; she wormed her way closer to him.

"Status report on our other hypothermia victim?"

"I don't know. Jack?" Peggy rolled over, giving her cold backside a chance to toast in Daniel's warmth, and nudged him. "Are you awake?"

He didn't respond at first, but when she kept trying to rouse him, she finally got a grouchy mumble of, "Stop it."

"But Jack," Daniel said, leaning over Peggy to ruffle Jack's damp hair, "we're your best friends."

"Oh God. _No."_ Jack's face was buried in the sleeping bag's down-filled side; Peggy could barely understand him. "So, for the record, I was running out of air, not to mention the hypothermia. I can't be held responsible --"

"Would you like some more coffee, Jack?" Peggy asked.

"Yes, please," he said meekly.

She helped him sit up. He was able to drink on his own now, though the hand holding the Thermos's unscrewed cup-lid -- the hand that had lost the glove -- was clumsy and she could tell his fingers were hurting him. And then there was his left arm. From the way he was holding his shoulder, he was obviously in pain.

"Jack, would you like me to see what I can do about your arm?"

"With your advanced medical degree?" Jack muttered, which Peggy inferred meant that he was feeling a lot better than earlier.

Daniel lit a Coleman lantern and Jack submitted to letting Peggy look at his arm, apparently realizing that he didn't have a choice. In the lantern's harsh, gaslight glare, he was even more of a mess than she'd realized earlier, gashed and bleeding from ice and sharp rocks. A vast bruise was purpling across his ribs, and his left arm was a swollen mass of colors above the elbow.

"I think it's broken somewhere near the shoulder," Peggy said, prodding at it.

"Ow! Watch it, Florence Nightingale," Jack muttered, almost dropping the cup of coffee.

"There's not much we can do for it, though. I don't suppose we have anything to splint it with, Daniel?"

They didn't, but Daniel sacrificed his shirt, which they tore into strips to bind Jack's arm to his chest. While Daniel made tea and mixed up a freeze-dried package of soup, Peggy doctored Jack's scrapes with the severely limited first-aid supplies that Daniel had brought with him. 

(Though their stock back the base camp was almost as limited. They hadn't come prepared for medical emergencies, which in retrospect Peggy thought was probably a regrettable failure of imagination on their part.)

Anyway, they couldn't do a thing about it until the storm let up. It looked like, for this night at least, none of them were going anywhere.

 

***

 

The rumbling of another avalanche shocked them out of sleep after darkness fell. Peggy sat bolt upright in claustrophobic pitch darkness with someone -- she realized a second later it was Jack -- gripping her arm hard enough to hurt. "It's not near us," she said, even though she wasn't actually sure whether it was or not. But she was reasonably confident they were far enough down the mountain to be safe, and anyway, Daniel had chosen their campsite well; they had the rocks to divert any slides that did make it down this far.

They sat in the dark, listening as the rumbling died away. "I ought to dig out our ventilation holes anyway," Daniel said, his voice making Peggy jump. Next to her, Jack was breathing rapidly. Peggy took his hand under the sleeping bag. After a moment he turned his hand around, palm to palm, and laced his fingers through hers.

Daniel lit the lantern, and the darkness in the tent was suddenly full of hissing white light and leaping shadows. He liberated a wool jumper from the pack to replace his destroyed shirt -- Peggy was fairly sure it was Jack's, but at this point, it hardly seemed to matter -- and crawled to unfasten the tent flap, then grunted when piled-up snow fell on his head. "Still coming down out there," he reported when he'd had a chance to look out.

"I'll make tea," Peggy decided, crawling over to the camp stove.

Nobody got much more sleep that night. They sat up drinking tea and coffee, nibbling on chocolate from Daniel's pack, and playing cards in between turning off the lantern to save fuel. Every so often a deep rumble would work its way up through the ground beneath them, and they fell silent and still, listening until the echoes died away.

"Your packs are still up on the mountainside, aren't they?" Daniel said after one of these incidents.

"Probably buried under twenty feet of snow now," Peggy said, and regretted her choice of words when she felt Jack shiver next to her. "It's just as well," she went on. "We saw no sign of a HYDRA base in our explorations, so either we're on the wrong mountain, or it's too well hidden to locate with the technology we currently have. I can have one of our pilots do an aerial survey the next time we have someone to spare, but I don't see any reason to continue risking our necks for this."

Jack looked at her sharply. In the lantern's harsh light, the bruises on his face were almost black. "You think we should pull out?"

"As head of SHIELD, albeit on a sort of vacation, I'm making that decision unilaterally. It's too dangerous, you're injured, and Ivchenko's journal is irretrievable. _I_ don't fancy interviewing him to try to get more information about it, do you?"

"I'd happily punch him," Jack said darkly. "I can't help feeling like this is the bastard's final joke on us."

"If it is," Peggy said, reaching across to turn up the stove's flame to melt more snow because damn it, she needed more tea to have this conversation, "then I'd like to point out that he's failed, _again._ We're safe and well -- reasonably well," she amended, with a look at Jack's bruised face. "We'll have other chances. I for one am actually looking forward to a few days in a nice quiet office when we get back."

"Did Peggy Carter just say that she's looking forward to desk duty?" Daniel asked. "Where is the real Peggy and what have you done with her?"

"Why do I put up with either of you?"

 

***

 

In the morning they dug their way out to a still, sparkling white world. The clouds were peeling away, leaving stark blue patches of blindingly brilliant sky. It was harsh and beautiful. Peggy stretched in the cold, crisp air and shook the snow off her coat while stamping her feet reluctantly into ice-cold boots. Daniel had sensibly shaken the snow off his boots and brought them into the tent to warm up, but he was the only one.

"So what I forgot, in my rush to clear out of camp yesterday, is the high-powered radio," Daniel remarked. "Not that I could've carried it anyway, with the rest of this other stuff; it's too big. Still, the last thing anyone heard from us was that half our team got caught in an avalanche, and then we went dark. We should probably let them know we aren't all dead, and start shoveling out the airstrip."

He insisted that he wouldn't have trouble descending the steep path even with a foot of new snow on it. With Jack injured and Daniel less suited to mountain climbing than the rest of them, Peggy decided to go on ahead to break trail, leaving the two of them to pack up and come down at their own pace.

It was something of a relief to have a couple of hours on her own, especially with no pack weighing her down. She floundered through the snow, enjoying the sharp bite of the air when she inhaled, the crisp cleanness of it.

She really did enjoy getting out of the office, although for her next vacation perhaps she would choose somewhere tropical, rather than hunting lost HYDRA bases in the Alps.

The path descended quickly, the snow becoming less of a burden to wade through as she went down, and she soon had to unzip her coat; the day was warming quickly. She turned to look back up the mountainside, fascinated by the zigzag trail she'd left in the unbroken blanket of snow. Higher on the mountain, the dirty fan-tails of slide areas cut through its fresh white coating, like someone had dragged a finger through marzipan on a cake.

She caught the movement of someone waving at her, either Jack or Daniel -- she couldn't tell without binoculars. Grinning, Peggy waved back.

The day was definitely above freezing, the snow melting to slushy puddles around her boots, by the time she made it to the little complex of buildings -- an abandoned weather station -- that they were using for their base camp. She didn't even think there was enough snow left on the dirt airstrip to be worth shoveling ... which was for the best, since she was just working on getting the radio fired up when the drone of an engine came to her ears.

Peggy came to the door of the hut and watched a cargo plane bank in a wide circle and come in for a landing. She waved, and was unsurprised to catch a glimpse of Howard waving back through the windshield as the plane rotated slowly to position itself for later takeoff.

Well, so much for their mountain vacation. Though she couldn't regret it: Jack needed to see a doctor, and she needed a bath.

By the time she'd walked to the airstrip, Howard was alighting from the plane, looking cheerful. "Peg! Glad to see you're not dead. Heard you had a little excitement."

"Nothing but the usual, Howard," she said. "Nothing but the usual."

 

***

 

Howard had his personal physician with him -- of course he had one, and of course she was an attractive woman in her thirties, because he was Howard. She seemed brisk and competent, with an Irish lilt to her speech, and Peggy liked her on sight. Peggy made tea and coffee, and had time for a very nice chat about being a woman doing a job in a man's world before Jack and Daniel showed up.

Daniel was carrying most of their gear. They both looked wiped out, and Jack in particular looked wan and had his good hand knotted into Daniel's pack strap for support, which he immediately let go of as soon as he saw them.

"Because Howard Stark was exactly what my day needed," Peggy heard him mutter, but he brightened up with Howard's doctor fussing over him.

Peggy made Daniel sit down and got to work packing up the remainder of their gear in the base camp. There wasn't a whole lot; they'd meant to be there for a week, but in the end it had only been two days, and some of it hadn't even been unpacked.

"Regrets?" Daniel asked, hands curled around the cup of coffee she'd given him.

"Not in the slightest." Peggy hefted a case of military-surplus rations that they hadn't even opened yet. "It would have been a feather in our caps to find the HYDRA facility, but ..." She shrugged. "You and I both know that any mission you walk away from is a good one."

"True."

They were wrapped up, loaded up, and ready to leave by early afternoon. The doctor went up front with Howard, who was teaching her to fly the plane. Peggy was content to remain on the jump seats in the back, where Jack and Daniel seemed to be quarreling over, of all things, Jack's seat belt, which Daniel had noticed he was having trouble fastening with one hand.

"You need help with that?"

"I've got it," Jack said snappishly.

"Since I _am_ your best friend and all."

"I swear to God, Sousa ..."

Peggy grinned and leaned her head against the side of the plane as the engines spun up for takeoff. She was tired; even a leisurely walk through the snow was exhausting, and this was on top of climbing half a mountain yesterday, almost freezing, and having very little sleep the past night.

The engines changed pitch, and Daniel leaned across the gap between the seats to take her hand. Peggy squeezed his fingers and smiled at Jack, who was caught in the act of giving them the "aren't they cute" look that she had first noticed him doing at their wedding, and on intermittent occasions since. He grimaced and then, reluctantly, grinned back, before closing his eyes as the wheels of the plane left the ground with a jolt. Peggy had a feeling he'd probably be asleep before they hit cruising altitude.

_Any mission you walk away from ..._

Which, thanks to Jack, she had.

And vice versa.

It had been a team effort. And, as she had known all along, she had a good team.


End file.
